HST 2012 - Civil War and Reconstruction

• Compare and contrast the differences between the economies of the northern and southern colonies (later the northern and southern states) that illustrates the development of plantation agriculture and slavery in the South and a predominantly mercantile and industrial economy in the North
• Discuss the social structure of the southern slave community and how the religion, songs, and folklore of the slave community were cultural expressions that illustrated the desire for freedom by African-American slaves
• Compare and contrast the military advantages of the North and South during the Civil War and how new technologies such as mass-produced rifled weapons changed the nature of warfare during the Civil War
• Explain how the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg sealed the fate of the Confederacy and ensured a victory for the North
• Explain how the Emancipation Proclamation and the post-war Reconstruction amendments established the idea of civil rights and equality in the Constitution, particularly the Fourteenth Amendment and its definitions of United States citizenship and equal protection
• Examine how Lincoln’s leadership and determination to maintain the federal structure of the United States were decisive in the Union victory during the Civil War and his evolving philosophy concerning the abolition of slavery during the war years
• Examine why Radical Reconstruction failed in the post-Civil War South due to the shift of the Republican Party from the issue of slavery and its abolition to economic concerns in the 1870s

• None

• Expansion and Federalism in America before the Civil War
• Sectionalism before the Civil War
• Missouri Compromise, nullification, and party strains
• Mexican cession and the Compromise of 1850
• Immigration, Know-Nothings, and the decline of the Whig Party
• Mexico, Cuba, and Kansas-Nebraska
• “Bleeding Kansas” and rise of the Republican Party
• Buchanan Administration, slave panics, and the 1860 election
• Slavery and roots of secession
• African American slave community
• Secession in the Upper and Lower South
• Fort Sumter Crisis and secession of the Upper South
• Nature of the war and the Battle of Bull Run
• Union offensive through spring 1862
• Confederate counterattacks: summer and fall 1862
• Emancipation and arming African Americans
• Gearing up for total war: winter and spring 1863
• The war turns: campaigns of 1863
• Union offensives of 1864 and the end of the Confederacy
• Wartime and presidential reconstruction
• Congressional reconstruction
• 14^th Amendment and the new United States Constitution
• 15th Amendment and radical reconstruction in the South
• Failure of radical reconstruction
• Compromise of 1877 and the end of Reconstruction